Brief History of Time

Professor Wedgewood received his Ph.D. in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of R. Byron Bird. R. Byron Bird started his undergraduate work at the University of Maryland in chemical engineering in 1941 but was persuaded to leave school in 1943 by the Army. When he left the service in 1946, he went to the University of Illinois where he received his B.S. in chemical engineering. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1950. He joined the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin in 1953, and today he is Professor Emeritus.

April 11, 2001

From Left : Martin, Jagannathan, Mukund, Prof. Turian, Prof. Bird, Prof. Wedgewood, Ketan, Dani, Prof. Nitsche

Professor Bird is known internationally for his work in fluid mechanics, rheology and kinetic theory. His books include Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids (Hirschfelder, Curtiss, and Bird) and Transport Phenomena (Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot). The latter is in its 52nd printing; the English language edition has sold over 200,000 copies. Transport Phenomena has also been published in Spanish, Italian, Czech, Russian and Chinese. Professor Bird has published a well-known text on rheology: Dynamics of Polymeric Liquids, Vols. 1 and 2 (Bird, Curtiss, Armstrong, and Hassager) and has written texts on the Dutch and Japanese languages.

Professor Bird has taught twice at the Technical University of Delft, first in 1958 and then again in the spring of 1994 when he was the first J.M. Burgers Professor. In the fall of 1994, he was a Visiting Professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. Earlier, in 1962-1963 he was a Fulbright Professor at Kyoto University and Nagoya University in Japan. His many honors include Honorary Doctoral degrees from Washington University (St. Louis), Lehigh, Technical University of Delft, Clarkson, Colorado School of Mines, Technion (Israel), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich), and the University of Kyoto. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and the Belgian Academy of Letters, Sciences, and Fine Arts. Professor Bird was awarded the Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology and the National Medal of Science.

Professor Bird received his Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of Joseph O. Hirschfelder. Prof. Hirschfelder is perhaps best known for the book Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids co-authored with Curtiss and Bird who were both graduate students at the time the text was written. Hirschfelder was one of the leading figures in theoretical chemistry during the period 1935-90. His sustained research program not only spanned five and one-half decades but a wide number of scientific areas as well: chemical kinetics, chemical applications of quantum mechanics, combustion, nuclear explosions, kinetic theory of gases, intermolecular forces, structure of liquids, and laser chemistry. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences at the relatively early age of forty-two and he was chosen to be a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at age forty-eight. At age sixty-five he received the National Medal of Science from President Gerald Ford "for his fundamental contributions to atomic and molecular quantum mechanics, the theory of the rates of chemical reactions, and the structure and properties of gases and liquids."

Professor Hirschfelder received his Ph.D. from Eugene P. Wigner. Professor Wigner died on January 1, 1995, at age 92. During his lifetime he was a major player in the development of the atomic bomb, the design of commercial nuclear reactors, and the progress of nuclear science in general. He was also a central figure in the history of ORNL, where he directed research from 1946 to 1947 with profound influence. His activities brought him numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963. Wigner was one of a number of Hungarian scientists who came to the United States in the 1930s--among them Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and John Von Neumann